Venus of Brisbane, 2015

This body of work was inspired by an article about the Venus of Willendorf, the famous statuette of a woman from the Upper Paleolithic period, which put forward the theory that it and similar archaeological finds were the result of female self-portraiture during pregnancy. Since its discovery, it has been widely assumed that men made the pieces to depict women, and I was surprised that I had shared that assumption. I decided to make my own self-portraits based on my personal experience of pregnancy. These works explore what it felt like to be pregnant. The drawings were made during my second and third trimester. The photographs were made not long after my son was born.